I was looking for a a coop game to play with my wife. She suggested Man of Medan. We're glad we didn't buy it on PC, but I'm kind of glad I already had a PS4 copy lying around. Developed by the same studio who delivered Until Dawn and The Quarry, Man of Medan, in my mind, comes from a studio that is capable of delivering compelling stories and interesting environments.
Instead, here we get five people on a boat. Five people who are no more memorable with the person you sat next to on that flight five years ago, and who are characters with no real dimensionality in the way they behave or act.
Man of Medan is a choose your own adventure game, with quick time events. It starts out on a military boat, where there's some great disaster, and it goes back to that same place some many decades later.
Only, there's still problems. How do steel pipes from a long dead ship's engine still emit steam? How do steel knives generate sparks when dragged along the steel walls on a steel ship?
Its very confusing, and there's no real moments of sanity throughout the game. It is meant to be a combination of psychological horror and jump scares, best played in a group - but... it is just completely un-endearing and unmemorable.
The only benefit is that the game doesn't take forever to get you to the end credits. There is of course... the ability to replay the game, but I'm not too sure why anyone would ever want to do that.
The pacing is bad. The writing is poor. The game environments are designed to be cramped, and as a result, the third person controls feel disjointed and annoying, like a very early 3d environment game. Each player character handles the same.
The first play through was a raging success with no one dying, which is not what you want out of a game like this. I think I'll be avoiding the rest of the Dark Pictures Anthology as... this was a very bad start to it. So bad that I'll probably sell my PS4 disc copy of this game to some unwitting victim.